The Office of Family Assistance (OFA)-sponsored Leveraging America’s Social and Economic Resilience TANF Learning Community (LASER TLC) initiative provided technical assistance (TA) and support to state, county, and tribal TANF programs in addressing the challenge of human services delivery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with Mathematica, BLH Technologies, Inc. managed the LASER TLC and developed a series of collective TA events, including a Tribal Affinity Group. These events featured national thought leaders and various program and practice models. The events also included opportunities for the 10 participating state, county and tribal LASER TLC sites to meet, discuss challenges, and ask questions of presenters. The LASER TLC produced the comprehensive Digital Resource Portfolio (Portfolio), which presents the information shared at the collective TA events.

OFA hosted two “Office Hours” sessions for State, county, and Tribal TANF programs in May 2023. The Office Hours sessions:

• Provided background information on the Digital Resource Portfolio's development.
• Described the Portfolio’s structure and organization and the core topics covered in support of TANF program improvement.
• Described how to access, efficiently navigate, and effectively use the Portfolio.

The American Public Human Services Association’s Advancing Family Economic Mobility initiative is exploring innovative ways for agencies to dismantle systemic barriers and enable families and the communities they live in to thrive. While families receiving TANF work towards economic mobility, they can encounter employment barriers. One barrier—lack of reliable, affordable transportation—can impede access to services, education, training, and quality jobs, especially for those living in remote or rural areas with limited or no public transit. This webpage provides an overview of the transportation services landscape and highlights practical and promising applications that can alleviate the transportation burdens families face on their path to economic mobility.

States have broad flexibility over the use of state and federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds. Many have used that flexibility to divert funds away from income support for families and toward other state budget areas often unrelated to TANF’s goals. In 2021, states spent only about a fifth of the funds on basic assistance to meet essential needs of families with children. As there is great variation in spending patterns, these downloadable fact sheets detail how each state spends its state and federal TANF funds.

Research shows that families living in poverty have a significantly higher likelihood of experiencing crises, and that poverty is the greatest threat to child well-being and the best predictor of abuse and neglect. Further, research suggests poverty is a key driver of child welfare system involvement and preliminary evidence suggests even modest economic supports can stabilize families and alleviate the need for more intensive intervention. Although the relationship between poverty and child neglect is supported by research, there is not yet a clear national policy and systems approach to intervening on behalf of families in ways that preserve the family unit while resolving safety issues compromised by poverty. Scattered across the country, however, are innovative policies, system reform efforts, program models, and practice strategies for bridging this gap.

The Office of Family Assistance (OFA), in partnership with the Children’s Bureau, hosted a webinar on April 18, 2023, from 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET which examined research conducted and presented by researchers from Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago.

The webinar

• Highlighted research findings contributing to the current knowledge base on the interrelationships among family economic insecurity and stability, income and concrete material supports, family well-being, and preventing child welfare system involvement.
• Described innovations introduced by states to bolster family economic security and protect children.
• Identified pain points and key challenges to collaboration and coordination derived from research and practice.

OFA Director Ann Flagg gave opening remarks. Webinar participants were able to ask questions and explore topics of interest in additional detail with the Chapin Hall researchers.

There are estimates that between 20 and 50 percent of people eligible for social safety net programs do not access them. While there may be many factors contributing to that gap, recent research has focused on the role that stigma plays. Stigma can be direct or anticipated from the wider society, including from agency workers with whom people would need to interact to access services. This Institute for Research on Poverty podcast episode examines how reducing stigma can increase participation in safety net programs.

TANF cash assistance and child support programs, with their restrictive policy environments and historically compliance-focused cultures, have opportunities for growth in how they engage families during continuous quality improvement efforts. To understand how TANF, child support, and other human services programs gather and use family input for program improvement, the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation has funded the TANF and Child Support Moving Forward: Further Incorporating Family Input Study. The study team collected and developed resources for a variety of audiences in TANF and child support programs, including program staff, program administrators, and families whom TANF and child support programs have served, currently serve, and aim to serve. This expansive toolkit provides guidance, real world examples, and resources to help TANF and child support programs engage the families they serve in improving service delivery, policy, and program operations.

Goal4 It!™ is a participant-centered framework for working with TANF participants to set goals, break their goals down into manageable steps, develop specific plans to achieve the steps, and regularly review their goal progress. This report summarizes the design and implementation of Goal4 It!™ at the Jefferson County, Colorado, Department of Human Services. The agency implemented Goal4 It!™ as an alternative to the traditional case management provided by Colorado Works, its TANF program. 

People facing economic instability often need more than one program or service. This might be particularly true for participants in certain programs—for example, families receiving TANF benefits might be more likely to face food insecurity given other circumstances in their lives. Even when participating in a single program, a small earnings increase can cause a loss of benefits. Also, some working parents view fragmented program rules as difficult to navigate with programs not designed to support upward economic mobility. These as well as other barriers challenge agencies to streamline coordination among programs. This analysis by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, using pre-COVID pandemic data, looks at the reach of the social safety net, including the interaction of specific programs, to better understand program participation as the economy continues to recover.

Experiments conducted in the mid-1990s show that a combination of work requirements and work supports substantially increased the employment of cash assistance recipients in Aid to Families with Dependent Children, while having little effect on recipients’ average income. There is little evidence on the effects of TANF’s work requirements, though, and recent research on other means-tested programs demonstrates that their work requirements have had little effect on employment and have substantially reduced the number of people receiving the benefits they provide. Using administrative data, this Congressional Budget Office working paper examines how Alabama’s recent expansion of its TANF work requirement to the parents of children between the ages of 6 months and 11 months affects their employment and income.

The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) hosted a webinar on March 21, 2023 — the second of a two-part webinar series entitled, The Whole Family Approach: How TANF Programs Can Engage Customers in Mental Health Services. In Part I of the webinar series on January 26, 2023, State and Tribal TANF programs discussed the intersection between poverty, trauma, and mental health and highlighted how their programs have helped improve long-term mental health outcomes for families with low incomes.

Part 2 built on the concepts introduced in Part I and the speakers shared the details of their programs’ whole family design and implementation processes, including how they identify services to include in their TANF programs, how they select and coordinate with supportive partnerships, what types of assessments they use when meeting with clients, and funding streams they utilize. They also highlighted successes and challenges they have experienced throughout the process. Participants received insights into the options TANF programs can explore in expanding and improving the mental health care for their TANF customers.